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‘All great achievements require time.’
Maya Angelou
Has your consultancy practice hit a plateau, and you don’t know how to fire it up? Here are eight simple ways to make it more efficient, competitive, and profitable.
1. It Starts with a Business Plan
The Business Plan is a written document that contains the goals and objectives of your consultancy practice and the strategies and timeframe for achieving them. It is to the consultant what a compass is to the navigator.
The business plan is particularly crucial at the start-up phase of the consultancy business, helping you visualize what you hope to achieve as you sell your services to clients and how you will do this.
A typical business plan should answer the following questions:
What services will you offer?
How will you get your clients?
How will you fund your day- to day operations?
What will you charge for your services (the Daily Rate)?
What will set you apart from the competition?
What kind of partnerships or associations will you have?
What do you want your business to look like in the future (your vision for the consultancy)?
The business plan is essential at any consultancy stage, whether you are just starting out, or making a course correction.
2. Register Your Consultancy Business
Is your consultancy business registered? This is a critical step in setting up your consultancy as a professional outfit. While you may have started as an independent and have made it to date by securing good work, you will soon realize how this will limit your potential to secure significant contracts. Several procurement processes are such that clients prefer dealing with registered businesses.
Registration also has implications for your firm’s tax compliance. While it is possible, and indeed, normal to ride on others’ duly registered consultancy outfits and brands, this is loaded with several risks and inconveniences:
· Working with partners that you don’t know very well.
· Reducing your bargaining power for better compensation.
· Administrative delays in getting contracts signed, work assignments, and payments.
· The risk of your partners not meeting their side of the bargain; never get paid for work
· Working in the shadows and never getting known as an expert in your own right.
3 Start Thinking Like a Business Owner, not a Geek.
How can you keep your eyes on the bottom line while also applying your best skills as an expert?
A consultant, by definition, is inherently adept in their subject area or industry skills. Indeed, technical expertise is what clients buy from the consultant. However, for an independent consultant, there is the extra burden of overseeing their enterprise, which requires essential business acumen- thinking and skills- while still selling technical expertise.
This idea goes against the grain for someone who considers himself a technical expert rather than an ‘entrepreneur '.After all, being an expert, aka consultant, is almost the antithesis of an entrepreneur.
In his Best Seller, The Cash Flow Quadrant’’, Robert Kiyosaki classifies consultants, typically the Self -Employed, together with the Employed on the left side of the quadrant where one is employed or owns a job rather than a business. In the classification, the Business Owner and the Investor fall on the right side of the quadrant.
According to Kiyosaki, the fundamental difference between the right and left sides of the quadrant is the mindset; less business, market thinking, and risk on the left side is what characterizes the self-employed and the employee.
Yet, it is essential to start building the mindset of a business owner to remain afloat as an independent consultant. We will explore how to do this in a future post.
4)Outsource
A professional expert must avoid the temptation of being a Jack of all trades. Although no task is too menial for a consultant, knowing and being true to your worth in professional time is essential. Once you have determined your daily or hourly rate, as discussed above, the next vital guardrail is to optimize your time by leveraging other people’s time and capabilities. As a technical expert, why would you also want to be known as the tea girl, the locksmith, the office messenger, or the receptionist?
A basic definition of outsourcing is hiring someone outside your firm or company to perform services and create goods traditionally performed in-house by the company's cost-reducing measure and-reducing measure but also an intelligent strategy to leverage your time as a self-employed professional. Time- Money arbitrage is the most tried and tested outsourcing.
Such leverage will multiply your work or energy on a task or project. It will free up your time and energy to focus on high-value tasks, thus increasing your productivity, efficiency, and profits. Through outsourcing, you keep to what is core while saving costs on overheads, personnel, technology; innovation; administration; and of course, your most valuable resource, time.
More importantly, according to Consultancy.UK, one of the main challenges that consultants are increasingly facing is changing client behavior, with clients demanding a higher quality of work and faster delivery of services.
To meet growing client expectations, and with the authority that comes with being the sole owner of your consultancy business, you can hire out different aspects of the processes to third parties when you need them. All it calls for from your side is managing the third parties. Use your time to generate money, and then use the money to buy other people's time. Think of swinging big doors on small hinges.
However, only relevant services or components of a task can be outsourced. Care must be taken not to infringe on the agreements of project-based contracts while outsourcing while also ensuring quality control.
5) Announce your Brand.
‘
Subtlety and modesty are appropriate for nuns and therapists, but if you’re in business, you’d better learn to speak up and announce your significant accomplishments to the world-nobody else will’’ Donald Trump: How to Get Rich.
Love or hate him, here is a quote from Donald Trump on the necessity of branding yourself. Every independent consultant is, first, an expert in their field and, secondly, a walking billboard of what knowledge and skills they sell.
Think of it this way, corporations, organizations, and institutions are set up with vital resources, systems, and personnel to manage the marketing and client-facing elements of the firm. In your consultancy practice, short of having a salesperson as the fi, you are, as the firm owner, the permanent salesperson, a walking billboard, always looking for ways and opportunities to attract business. Announce your brand or live with the consequences of not getting noticed.
6) Sharpen Your Skills
To remain competitive as a professional, you must continually sharpen your skills and adopt more efficient working methods to match your talent, passion, and competencies. With growing automation and digital solutions, there has never been a better time in the world to find tools to make work more efficient, keep the office organized, keep your books of accounts more orderly, and track progress; the list is endless. And help is at hand.
The most accessible place to start is online platforms such as Skill Share or Udemy… those skills-building websites packed with enthusiastic tutors offering practical skills in many technical areas. I love them. Enroll in online certificate courses in your field or industry. Great platforms such as Global Health Resources for the health sector; or plug-into Communities of Practice exist. Increasingly, post-Covid, there are also many Webinars to plug into. There is no excuse not to sharpen your professional skills to give you a competitive edge.
7) Create New Business Opportunities
It is critical to keep the contracts flowing. You will often hear about the consultancy drought; we can always blame it on the economy. But, as a professional, you must do your part to mitigate against long dry spells. Write up that new business proposal. The bid is the lifeline of consultancy practice. Keep your eyes and ears out for new business while working hard to complete current projects.
This may also mean creating work for yourself. This is where the network meeting becomes crucial; being in the right place at the right time. As you will quickly realize, the real deals are sealed long before the bid. But remember, it is a deal once it is penned!
In our next post, we will explore the power of networking.
Share with us below which tips you plan to adopt immediately to improve your independent consultancy practice.
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